There are many different ways to learn information, but among my colleagues in medical school, flashcards are one of the most common ways to study. While making flashcards may seem simple straight forward, I have learned over time that the exact opposite is the case.

If you’ve spent a school year (or ten) in the Boston area, you know that New England winters aren’t always fun. On a 10 degree day in February, it takes a lot of motivation for me to venture outside. After several years of school, I know that I study more efficiently when I’m not at my house; when I’m home, it’s too easy to succumb to the temptations of chatting with my roommates, rummaging through the kitchen, or taking a nice nap. The problem is that as it gets colder, going somewhere else to study becomes much harder. Here are some places in the Boston/Cambridge area that make it worth the trek – in any weather!

One of the differences between high school and college can (depending on your particular experience) be how much you know about what you are going to be reading and when, and what days your exams and papers will be. Professors may have different levels of detail but generally speaking the syllabus is supposed to tell you what you’ll be reading, when your assignments will be due, how your grade will be calculated, what you have to do to pass, fail or excel in the class, the rules of the class (the absence policy, what happens if you text in class, can you turn in your work late?), and sometimes the rules of the University that affect the class, like what would happen if someone cheated. Most importantly, your professor and the University assume that you know and understand the policies on the syllabus. At the end of the course, you can’t say you didn’t know about a requirement you didn’t meet or a rule you broke if those things are clearly spelled out on the syllabus. It’s helpful, too: don’t have the money to buy all the texts immediately? The syllabus will tell you which ones to buy first. And you can hightail it to the university and public libraries to see if you can check out any of the required texts.

One of the greatest challenges of our generation is the nearly constant distraction and temptation that technology affords us, from opening a new tab on our web browser to surfing apps on our phone. How do we harness all of the positive connectivity that these tools offer us, without feeling that our lives are dominated by them?

For teachers and students, there’s a way in which September 1 is our January 1, as far as resolutions and new starts go. And once you get back to class, whether it’s college or high school you won’t have time to think about resolutions. So think about this over the last week of summer: How about making a pledge to study without electronic distraction when school starts? Why would anyone do that? Well:

How should we fuel our bodies? What’s the best thing to eat before track practice? What’s the best thing to eat before the SAT? These and other questions are the subject of much debate in the public sphere, where fad diets like ketogenic or paleo come and go with the wind. My goal in this post is not to give you rules on eating healthy, but to impart a few core principles that you can take with you in life as you make your own diet decisions, especially with regards to optimizing energy for your academic pursuits.

People often assume that decision-making is an activity that requires effort but not stamina. This is a very common misconception – mental effort is as taxing on the brain as physical workouts are on the body, and our mental resources are much more limited than we think. In psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making.

This reading type didn't quite make it into the list...

The most useful thing I learned my freshman year of college was how to read. I already knew how to read—how to turn blocks of letters into words—but as an earnest college freshman, I found that I was reading far too slowly. In an hour, I would get through four or five pages, having generated copious notes and a sense of self-doubt. Mercifully for earnest-19 year old me, my American Lit professor gave me some advice about how to read that has stuck with me since:

It happens all the time. You need to study, but your brain is so tired it’s numb, or a little voice in your head is chirping at you to watch a movie or spend time watching Youtube videos of goats. Anything instead of study! But your test is tomorrow, or you have something due soon, so how do you force yourself to focus? As a homework tutor for middle school kids in NYC, I encounter this problem a lot, but these methods work for students of all ages. Here are some tricks that I have found to work the best:

Let's assume, shall we, that your child's future does not involve extensive game show celebrity-dom. Even then, time management will come in handy!

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Although many of us feel we lack the time we need to get everything done – that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day – Thoreau reminds us of the importance of living at our own pace and learning to use time to our advantage.

As a homework tutor, time management is among the most common concerns voiced by parents and students. Students these days are perhaps busier than ever before: between academics and a barrage of extracurricular commitments, how can your child expect to keep up the juggling act and manage to get enough rest?

This is especially true at the middle school level, which is fraught with new expectations; for many students, this is their first experience with moving between classes, subject-specific teachers, and such a significant workload. At this age, students have to learn how to learn most efficiently. While there are plenty of homework tutors for middle school kids in NYC, Boston, and online ready to help, there are certainly things you can do as a parent to be proactive.

In this post, I outline strategies for developing a proactive approach to time management and study skills. The transition to middle school can be intimidating, but by developing a concrete study schedule, your child will gain greater control over his time and work more confidently through new material. Here’s how to get started: